


Nice Meeting You

by warmachine



Category: Sonic the Hedgehog - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, Nonverbal Communication, Pre-Relationship, Sign Language, i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-04
Updated: 2019-09-04
Packaged: 2020-10-09 22:42:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20517629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/warmachine/pseuds/warmachine
Summary: There shouldn’t be anything stopping Metal Sonic from speaking, and yet he’s still never said a word. Eggman doesn’t understand why, wonders if he’s eventryingto, and has now begrudgingly decided to ask a certain hedgehog for help. Sonic’s talkative, Sonic’s annoying, and they hate each other—right? Surely, Sonic would provoke him and get him to saysomething. It made perfect sense.A fic where Metal reminds Sonic of when he didn’t speak, either, and they start to see each other in a new way because of it.End notes updated 2020/07/26





	Nice Meeting You

**Author's Note:**

> hey what’s up i’m back at it again already with the Sonic Fan Fiction. here are some notes elaborating more on this fic's premise.
> 
> why this is about nonverbal communication & involves (american) sign language (tl;dr: sonic & metal are both preverbal): i’ve taken the fact that classic sonic doesn’t speak as evidence that sonic was preverbal. (am i projecting?? Yes!!) and since metal was created based off of sonic, i think it makes sense that he is also preverbal or even nonverbal babey! i have so many thoughts & headcanons about this especially b/c im an autistic person myself :) but they’re not really relevant atm
> 
> so, in this fic, metal has the components for synthesizing speech, but he doesn’t talk. eggman doesn’t understand why he won’t, and he can't think of anything that could possibly be stopping him from doing so. meanwhile, sonic Does understand this because he was the same way, and he genuinely wants to help. it causes him and metal to start seeing each other in a different light.
> 
> hope this wasn’t too long-winded! i have more to say that isn’t so important so that’s all in the notes at the end. thanks for checking my fic out :’)

“Ouch!”

Sonic sat up, rubbing his head where it’d slammed in to the wall. Eggman had been weirdly persistent, overwhelming Sonic with more Badniks than he’d ever seen. Thus, Eggman actually managed to capture the hedgehog this time, and throw him in this… depressing, small room. Not even a prison cell—it was just featureless and closed off, with one door on either end and nothing in between.

“What’s the big idea, Eggman?” Sonic demanded, tilting his head back to glare at the security camera affixed near the ceiling. “I know you can hear me!”

“I have a _task_ for you, Sonic.” Eggman’s voice was grainy, coming through a speaker somewhere else in the room. “I need you to get Metal Sonic to talk.”

“You—“ Sonic interrupted his own accusation, caught off guard. “You want me to… what?”

“Get Metal Sonic to talk!” Eggman repeated. Sonic blinked, and shook his head with confusion, still not understanding why exactly Eggman was asking _him_ for help. With Metal, of all things….

“He hates you!” the doctor elaborated. “He won’t talk to me, but surely he has plenty of things he’ll say to _you_ if you, I don’t know, rile him up enough.”

Sonic shook his head again, incredulous, and wondering whether this was some kind of bizarre scheme to make him let his guard down. That had to be it—he’d be trapped in this little room with Metal, who supposedly needed help and _wasn’t_ going to try to kill him, and then… when Sonic least expected it….

_Bam!_ The door on the other end of the room swung open, suddenly, startling Sonic and causing him to flinch. Sure enough, Metal Sonic entered, slamming the door back shut behind himself after he was across the threshold. And, if Sonic didn’t know any better, he’d say Metal looked… uneasy, somehow. Usually he stared straight at Sonic with that horrible, piercing gaze of his, but this time he was looking off to the side, his head turned away. As if he didn’t want to be there.

Sonic was still sitting on the floor where he’d been tossed before, so he stood, slowly, watching Metal closely. He was just… standing there, still avoiding making eye contact with Sonic, his hands clenched in to fists at his sides.

“Uhh… Metal?” Sonic called, still wary. “You gonna try to kill me now, or what?”

Metal turned, then, finally meeting Sonic’s eyes with his own artificial ones. It was still, for a moment, and Sonic tried not to let himself get unsettled by Metal’s stare. And then Metal shook his head.

“You’re not?” Sonic asked. He decided to take a few tentative steps toward the robot. “So… Eggman really _does_ want me to help you speak?”

A nod from Metal, that time.

“Huh.” Sonic ran one hand through his quills as he closed the rest of the distance between himself and Metal. Was this really not a trap…?

He came to a stop a few feet in front of Metal, who was still staring at him. Sonic found himself starting to hope that this was genuine—if it was true that Metal wasn’t speaking, even though he was apparently supposed to now, Sonic wanted to help him. He knew exactly what that felt like.

“Do you, um…” Sonic started, unsure of how to ask his question. Technical jargon was not one of his strong suits. “Does your voice… or whatever you have… work? Like, the parts or whatever?”

Metal nodded once more.

“So, you’re technically capable of talking, but… you don’t want to? Or you still feel like you can’t? Something like that?”

Another nod. Sonic felt a slight pang in his chest, then—this was all too familiar, and he stepped closer to Metal, doing his best to shoot him an encouraging smile. “There’s nothing wrong with that.” Sonic nodded to punctuate his point when Metal tilted his head, clearly skeptical. “Yeah,” he assured. “It’s okay to not talk. No matter what people might tell you.”

The room fell silent again, Sonic waiting to see if Metal had any input before he continued—he wasn’t surprised when he didn’t. “Okay, um,” Sonic began again, “do you sign?”

Metal shook his head.

“Oh.” Sonic glanced away, pulling at his glove idly while he spoke. “Well, I used to sign, back before I started talking.” He looked back to Metal. “Do you just rely on your body language alone, then?” Sonic asked, and he was surprised when Metal shook his head once more, following the movement up with a _beep_.

“Oh!” Sonic exclaimed. He’d never heard Metal make such a… _non-threatening_ sound like that before, and he smiled to himself, glancing away somewhat shyly from Metal again as he mumbled. “That’s cute….” He looked back over after a few seconds and cleared his throat awkwardly, about to keep going. He lost his thought, though, when he noticed that Metal was… blushing? There seemed to be more red in his eyes at the bottom of his screen, just above his cheeks. It was endearing, Sonic thought, feeling a little flustered inside.

He shook his head. He had to get back to the task at hand.

“A-Anyway, uh….” Sonic tried to regain his train of thought. “Do you want to learn sign language? I could help you get started, I guess, or… maybe you could, like… download some kind of signing database….” Sonic smiled sheepishly when Metal crossed his arms with an unimpressed shake of his head. “That’s not how you work, huh? Well… I can just help you, then, if you want.”

Metal’s eyes flickered a few times, and Sonic wondered if that meant he was thinking about it. “Here: how about I show you an example?” he offered. “Like… introducing yourself.” Sonic nodded to reassure himself—this was simple enough, right? A good example? “I could ask you ‘What’s your name?’, like this….” Sonic brought his hand up, his palm facing outward, looking inquisitive as he mouthed the word _your_. Moved his hand back down a little to meet his other one, tapping his fingers against his other hand’s—_name_—before finally moving them down and around a bit more as he turned them face-up—_what_? “And then,” he continued aloud, “you’d spell your name for me, like this….” Sonic then raised his fist, moving it from side to side while he slowly formed the letters, ending with his fingers in an “L” shape. “M-E-T-A-L.”

Sonic stopped there, waiting to see if Metal was going to respond at all. He didn’t; he just continued watching Sonic, his arms still crossed from before, glancing down at Sonic’s hands as if he was expecting more.

“Well,” Sonic started, deciding to keep going, “after I know your name, I could start calling you something else instead of spelling it. Like, maybe….” He moved his hand up to tap at his face. “Just the word ‘metal’. Well, hopefully something better than that, but… you know.”

Metal’s eyes flickered again, and then he nodded, seeming to understand what Sonic had been explaining. Sonic was about to ask him what he was thinking when, to Sonic’s surprise, Metal uncrossed his arms, and suddenly started signing what Sonic had signed before: _What’s your name?_

“Wow, I….” Sonic blinked, astonished. “I guess you _would_ have remembered all that already, huh? Being a robot and all….” He placed his hand on his chest, next spelling out the letters for “Sonic”. “I’m Sonic.” He paused with a frown. “I don’t remember what sign Tails used to call me, though….”

Metal looked down at his own hands, spelling “Sonic” back to himself a few times. Sonic smiled at him when he glanced back up to make eye contact again, feeling genuinely happy when Metal started to sign a response. He repeated what Sonic had done—hand to his chest—and then spelled out his name, combining it with what Sonic had just signed: _M-E-T-A-L S-O-N-I-C_.

“It’s not so hard, is it?” Sonic said, grinning. “You’ve just gotta… practice it, just like with any language.”

Metal shifted his gaze away again, nodding slowly, giving off a mood that Sonic couldn’t quite identify. He seemed as though he wasn’t used to this kind of thing; like he wasn’t used to someone just trying to understand him and help him. It made Sonic feel… sort of sad. He couldn’t help but want to try to comfort him.

“Metal—“

Sonic jumped when a screeching noise came over the speaker and interrupted him. He heard banging for a moment before Eggman’s voice came through. “Blasted microphone— Sonic!” he bellowed. “Have you gotten him to speak yet?”

“What?” Sonic turned his head to confirm that the camera he’d seen earlier was really there, and sure enough, he hadn’t imagined it. “Weren’t you watching?”

“I have better things to do than to sit around and watch you talk to my robot, believe it or not,” Eggman huffed. “Now answer the question!”

Sonic sighed, glancing back over at Metal for a second. He was still looking away with that melancholy air about him. “I mean….” Sonic turned back to the camera. “Yes and no?”

“What is that supposed to mean?!” demanded Eggman. “Did you or didn’t you?”

“He’s not talking aloud,” Sonic explained. “And I’m not gonna try to make him if he doesn’t want to. But I think he’s up for using sign language.”

“Sign language—“ Eggman cut himself off with an exasperated groan, and Sonic could just picture him pressing at his temples with irritation. “I don’t have time to be learning _sign language_ for a robot! There shouldn’t be anything stopping him from speaking!” Sonic heard Eggman sigh. “I’ll have to keep working on it. I _know_ he can speak.”

Sonic crossed his arms, about to argue with Eggman about why he shouldn’t be trying to force Metal to talk, when a trap door suddenly opened up beneath him.

“Now, get out of my lair!”

The last thing Sonic saw before he fell was Metal stepping toward him, looking as if he was about to grab Sonic to keep him from getting kicked out.

Sonic found himself wishing that he had.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! here are some notes on why i’ve split this in to chapters which i guess isn’t Really that important but i wanted to talk about it anyway and the sign language.
> 
> i was planning on just finishing this and then posting it all at once as a long one-shot, but i’ve split it in to chapters instead. i know where i want things to go but i’m still figuring out how exactly i want to get there. i keep rewriting everything that happens after this point lmao. (this is also why i didn’t tag this with much of anything yet.) however, i am confident in what i’ve posted here. i’ve hardly changed this part even while i’ve been rewriting everything else, and i honestly think that it could work as a standalone pre-relationship one-shot if it absolutely had to. so, i figured i’d post it as a multi-chapter fic so i could Start getting it out there & then keep working on the rest. maybe the fact that i published part of it will motivate me to actually finish writing something for once!!!!!! which i very much need rn tbh i’ve really been Going Through It lately
> 
> i apologize if the way i wrote the sign language was incorrect or otherwise Not Good. i used to know a Tiny bit of asl a long time ago but never really learned more and i’ve definitely forgotten everything now Whoops! so i worked hard to try to make sure i was using the right terms & i looked in sentence structure, although that didn't really come up in this part. i also tried not to be too specific in describing the signs. i wanted to be specific enough that if you know the signs, the descriptions make sense & are recognizable, but not so specific that they make the fic awkward to read and complicated to visualize. i hope i did ok.
> 
> oh, also—just like the one (1) other sonic fic i’ve posted, this one is named after [a song](//www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yag-6-EFX1s) from the knuckles’s chaotix ost. i mean i guess “nice to meet you” isn’t a unique phrase but i definitely chose it b/c i was listening to the ost again. i thought it was appropriate because they are communicating with each other genuinely for the first time :’)
> 
> thanks again for reading what i’ve written so far! and if you read all these notes as well thank you for that too! i hope i can stay motivated to write more and get this finished before too long.
> 
> p.s. you can also find me [on twitter](//twitter.com/prjshadow) :’) i’d love to talk abt sonic if anyone wants to i’m so full of feelings and ideas
> 
> * * *
> 
> **edit 2020/03/23:** my health has been quite bad for a while; i've gone to the hospital multiple times and all which has been really tiring! so, i'm not sure when i will be able to finish writing this. i do still want to, of course, and have ideas for it! i hope i can get back to it soon; in the meantime, i'm sorry for the delay.  
**edit 2020/07/26:** marked this as completed. i would like to explore this idea more at some point like i had planned, but i don't know when or if i'll be able to. i'm deeply sorry! thank you for reading!


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